Silence is Golden: exploiting jamming and radio silence to communicate

TL;DR

This paper introduces Silence is Golden (SiG), a novel anti-jamming protocol that enables reliable communication under powerful adversary models with reactive and proactive jamming capabilities, outperforming existing solutions.

Contribution

The paper presents a new adversary model with both reactive and proactive jamming, and proposes SiG, a protocol that maintains communication despite such adversaries, supported by theoretical and experimental validation.

Findings

SiG achieves over 99% message delivery probability in challenging jamming scenarios.

It outperforms existing anti-jamming solutions by effectively mitigating high-capacity jammers.

Experimental results confirm the protocol's viability in real-world conditions.

Abstract

Jamming techniques require just moderate resources to be deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is unprecedented. In this paper we introduce several contributions to jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this powerful but yet realistic adversary model, the communication bandwidth provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti jamming protocol that, introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128 bits long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots in the presence of a jammer that jams all the on-the-fly communications and the 74% of the silent radio spectrum---while competing proposals simply fail. The provided solution enjoys a thorough theoretical analysis and is supported by extensive experimental results, showing the viability of our proposal.